Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Cliché watch: 'Boots on the ground'

Stories in the Tribune using the expression "boots on the ground" to refer to military men and women in a combat theater from the mid 1980s (when the digital record begins) until Sept. 24, 2001 -- Zero.

...from Sept. 25, 2001 to Jan 1, 2010 --- about 60

...from Jan 1, 2010 through today -- about 55

New York Times, similar search -- 3, 144, 161

First use I can find in a Nexis search of all U.S. news sources is from an Oct. 10, 1994 transcript of CNN's "Crossfire" in which retired Desert Storm Army Commander Lt. Gen John Yoesock says of the then-gathering crisis in Iraq, " We need a credible deterrent force. We do have credible deterrent forces in the form of our naval forces and- as well as our air forces, and we have sustained those from the time of Desert Shield and Desert Storm. What would be the other vital ingredient is the thing that really buys deterrents, and it's boots on the ground by soldiers and marines."

The first use of this military slang by a citizen scribe seems to have been in a July 2, 1995, column by Jim Wright of the Dallas Morning News in which he wrote "The Marines, dating back to the Revolutionary War and the shores of Tripoli, have been able to put boots on the ground in a hurry when trouble boils up somewhere."

The word boot, in this symbolism, does not stand for a high-ankle shoe but for the person who wears it. In 1944, Marine inductees were called boots, and their introduction to service in World War II was in boot camp. .... Throughout 2007 and the 2008 presidential campaign, focus was on timetables or benchmarks for ultimate withdrawal of U.S. “boots” from Iraq.

Safire alludes to the first published reference being an April, 1980 usage in the Christian Science Monitor:

Many American strategists now argue that even light, token US land forces—‘getting US combat boots on the ground’, as General [Volney F.] Warner puts it—would signal to an enemy that the US is physically guarding the area.]

As Zimmer observes, this expression is what our English teachers called "synecdoche," in which a part of something -- here the boots -- is understood to represent the whole. Other examples

Wheels to mean a car or cars

ABCs to mean basic reading and writing skills

The waves to mean the ocean or other large body of water.

Posted at 12:57:48 PM

Comments

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I hope we'll hear from folks when it starts appearing in business contexts, as you know it HAS to eventually - i.e., "to get through (this uptick in customer service problems, for example), the bottom line at the end of the day is that our only near-term option is to have boots on the ground"

--Pop-culture reference. The scify reboot of BattleStar Galactica made reference to Facts on the Ground. Though planned well before 9/11, BSG had a lot of terrorism and ultra military type themes running through it.

Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Fleet Street, K Street--seems like streets do well to represent industries. I am not sure if they are true synechdoches, though, as they are not so much parts of a whole as emblems or locational stand-ins.

I'm about to get really pedantic, but I think the correct term for the use of "boots" as a stand-in for soldiers is metomyny rather than synechdoche. I think quotidian's street-based stand-ins are also examples of metomyny, not synechdoche.

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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.